


If Not Trapped, Tethered and Bound

by DrDiabolical



Series: Naruto One-Shots [1]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Dark, Death, Gen, Ghosts, Hatake Kakashi-centric, Haunting, Implied/Referenced Suicide, One Shot, POV Hatake Kakashi, Young Hatake Kakashi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-07
Updated: 2020-12-07
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:33:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27943835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DrDiabolical/pseuds/DrDiabolical
Summary: Kakashi wasn’t sure how much of her was her, exactly, and how much of it was just… whatever happened to people after they died but refused to depart for the Pureland.
Relationships: Hatake Kakashi & Nohara Rin
Series: Naruto One-Shots [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2046350
Kudos: 12





	If Not Trapped, Tethered and Bound

**Author's Note:**

> Just a little one-shot I wrote on a whim. I originally wanted it to expand past this but it wasn't happening. 
> 
> I wrote this on the 29th of October. Should have posted it on Halloween really.

Kakashi had a habit of visiting the memorial stone. 

While he was there, he did not speak. There was no point. No phantoms or spectres or spirits hung over graves. Why would they, really? If not trapped, tethered and bound. Why would anyone willingly tie themselves to a solitary hunk of stone embedded in tear-damp soil, six feet above the decrepit reminders of their end?

No, it only made sense that they would tie themselves to something of significance. Or someone. 

The reason why Kakashi visited the memorial stone was that nothing was there. For all they supposedly rested in coffins and urns, the dead avoided their beds at all costs. Even if it meant detaching themselves from their significant someone. 

No whisperings. No cold spots. No nothing. Only here could Kakashi find warmth in the sun and take peace from nature's ambience. When he took his first step outside of the graveyard, all of that would be gone and replaced by _her_.

He was sure she meant well. Positive, even. She wanted him safe. Wanted him unharmed. Wanted him happy. Wanted him to be loved. But there was a rot in her core that clawed at her good intentions and hammered them into the road to hell. She was haunted, which was a funny thing to say about the ghost currently haunting him but he could feel it where she settled within his chest, tucked into his right ventricle. 

She shuttered sometimes, little discharges of electricity making his heart stutter. She pulled the warmth from his blood with every beat, paled his skin and chilled his bones. Her whisperings kept him awake at night and drew inverted moons beneath his eyes. His very nerves ached with her sorrow and love in turn. It should have been debilitating.

Should have been, but wasn’t. Because when he threw himself into mission after mission, brushing against death so many times they practically shook hands, she wouldn’t let him die and healed him just enough to bring him back from the brink. 

As she had been when she was alive, she made a point of not healing every little scrape. More so now, she didn’t even heal the grievous wounds completely. Far from it, she did enough to ensure that he lived, but if he fell into a coma? Couldn’t move from his hospital bed for days? Delayed his mission while his comrades patched him up and carried him home? Those were lessons. Or perhaps they were a prevention. A measure to force him to take a break. Or maybe she simply didn’t have the power to do more than the minimum. 

He tested it, once. Test, in name only. She screamed so loud the resounding tinnitus that followed still cropped up from time to time. 

Kakashi wasn’t sure how much of her was her, exactly, and how much of it was just… whatever happened to people after they died but refused to depart for the Pureland. If it was painful for him to witness, it had to be so much worse for her. 

Yet, she refused to let go. Sometimes it felt like there wasn't anything outside of her and him, his world bending to her words and her existence known only to him. Her and him and no one else. 

Making friends was difficult when you were both known as a friend killer and had a paranoid ghost in your heart. She tentatively trusted Gai and not many others. Sometimes, Kakashi resented Gai for that. The feeling was misplaced, he knew it was a redirection of what he felt about her but… he couldn’t hate her, but he could hate what she did and, by extension, what she thought. 

Although, not everything she did could be hated. He loved the bright patches, sewn between the expansive darkness that cloaked her being. Bits and pieces of who she had been when she was alive peeking through. 

_Look, Kakashi, the foxglove are blooming, let’s pick some, they’ll look so pretty in a vase._

_... and when they dry out, we can crush the petals and leaves to make poison._

Guilt tugged at his heartstrings when he did snap at her, amplified when she too tugged in retaliation. He wondered how many had snapped already. Stress, she told him, could do that. Heartbreak, too. That was why he shouldn’t fall in love, she said, why he should keep himself at a distance from others. Because she knew, intimately, what happened when a person put their heart in another’s hand. 

They would strike it down with a running fist, carve an empty cavern into his chest. They’d do it because they loved him, she said, because they had no other choice. He would put himself in the position for them, even, perhaps force their hand. But, in the end, he’d die, by the hand of the one he loved. She told him this with a worldly certainty not even the longest-serving ANBU could replicate when delivering severe orders. 

Kakashi listened to her, went along with almost everything she asked of him, followed her guidance. He owed it to her, after all.

It was only right that Rin should take his heart after he destroyed hers.

**Author's Note:**

> [Originally posted on my tumblr.](https://drdiabolical.tumblr.com/post/633421428857913344/the-ghost-in-kakashis-heart)


End file.
